Training the next generation of Indigenous leaders

There’s an urgent need to equip a new generation of First Nation, Métis and Inuit leaders for success. A small group of Canadian business schools are responding with for-credit, Indigenous-focused programs, and they’re looking for others to join them.

“We’re in survival mode,” declares Joy Cramer, a member of Sagkeeng First Nation in Manitoba, a long-time aboriginal advocate and, as of last January, the director of Indigenous programs at Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business. According to Cramer, Canada’s dark history of residential school abuse has meant that Indigenous people “are trying to survive after decades and decades of what we’re now saying is attempted genocide and genocidal activities towards us as people.”